Lightyear Corp. acquires Chain Inc., names the new company Interstellar

Chain Inc., a San Francisco technology start up has been acquired by Stellar – based Lightyear Corporation. This new company has been named Interstellar.

Chain, a blockchain infrastructure company that enables organizations to build better financial services from the ground up, raised more than $40 million from companies such as Visa, Citi Ventures, as well as Nasdaq.

“If you look at our work with Visa, Citi, in every case, we made huge progress, but we would also find ourselves at an impasse when it was the partners who had to instantiate a blockchain. We needed a chain that anyone could access,” said Adam Ludwin, former RRE Ventures partner and Chain Ceo.

While Ludwin will lead Interstellar as its new CEO, Jed McCaleb, creator of XRP and Stellar Protocols, will be its acting CTO.

Interstellar will retain all of Chain’s employees, including co-founder Devon Gundry, who will still work as the chief product officer

The new company Interstellar will migrate Chain’s customer base and products onto Stellar’s global public ledger, which will further help organizations to issue, exchange and manage assets.

No change in direction: Ludwin

Ludwin went on to say that this accession by Lightyear shouldn’t be viewed as a change in direction, even though Chain’s work focused mostly on private blockchains.

“When we started a few years ago, our customers were not ready for a public network. Fast forward to three years, they’re willingness has gone up, and the maturity of the public networks has changed a lot,” he added.

StellarX, a new marketplace for trading assets on Stellar, will be a part of the product portfolio. It is in beta phase and can be accessed by the public soon

The main intention of Interstellar is to move projects from private to public space. “We were looking for a way to help our customers move the projects that we have been working on from a private network to a public one,” said Ludwin